Australian art history

Forty years ago, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura, Clifford Possum and Johnny Warangula were central to the constitution of contemporary desert art at Papunya. Standing out among an exceptional cohort, these four selected artists deployed their inherited iconography while exploring the new poetic possibilities offered by paint on canvas. This thesis addresses the question: how, and to what extent, did the artists’ intercultural experience affect their agency and creative processes? The answers to that question will contribute to a deeper understanding of a critical juncture in the nation’s art history, when the advent of Papunya Tula art redirected attention from the ‘European’ artists of the south-eastern seaboard and instead inaugurated a heterogeneous conception of Australia’s culture with Indigenous voices at its centre.

This thesis will draw on social history and visual anthropology, as well as formal and technical artwork analysis to identify the diverse influences that contributed to Papunya Tula painting in place, and over time. Rather than commencing analysis in 1971, when Kaapa’s revolutionary paintings first came to public attention, the social and ontological context from which Papunya Tula art emerged is foregrounded. Central Australia in the mid-20th Century is examined to reveal how disparate peoples were drawn into a dynamically evolving contact zone. The novel visual forms produced at the Finke River Mission are shown to reflect the ongoing dialogic struggle between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ontologies in Central Australia. Moreover, it is argued that exchange between diverse Aboriginal groups, with markedly different life experiences, was critical to the development of contemporary desert art. The link between the Western Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira and the selected artists is substantiated and his influence evaluated. The importance of Namatjira’s ‘framing’ of Country as a subject for cultural exchange is highlighted.

Papunya is located at the intersection of major cultural and linguist blocs. This thesis reasserts the role played by the selected Central Australian artists in the formation of the painting movement at Papunya. It challenges the conflation of Papunya Tula art with ‘Western Desert art’, an assumption that was cemented by the title of Geoffrey Bardon’s 1979 monograph. Critical pictorial innovations developed by each of the selected artists are identified, and their operation in picture-making is described. Digging deeper, formal qualities of the four selected artists’ paintings are examined, to identify evidence of their creative processes and individual sensibilities. In establishing the progression of formal elements within series of paintings, the significance of ongoing creative dialogue between these four artists is verified. The outcomes of their collaborations are presented as a narrative of studio practice in a desert environment.

The creation of murals at the Papunya School in 1971 is cited as the event that inaugurated the Western Desert painting movement. The truth of this claim is in fact more complex, confounding and consequential. This essay will demonstrate that few outside the Papunya community saw the murals in situ, and that the mythic status now enjoyed by these icons has been constructed post factum. The subject of one of the murals, the local Honey Ant Dreaming, and the broader social and ontological context in which it was created will be examined. It will show how the Honey Ant Mural played into a dynamic shift in intercultural relations that was already underway. Rather than being a singular monument, the Honey Ant mural signals a more substantive challenge to the infrastructure of the assimilation era.

The subject of the largest mural, the tunnels and chambers of the Honey Ant site leading to Papunya, make visible the songlines and kinship networks that connect Aboriginal people and country—these are the unseen verities that govern life in Central Australia. The authority of men previously relegated to duties as manual workers, became apparent as they painted resonant icons in a pedagogical setting. The customary power of these settlement workers was manifest through the depth of their relationship to the images they created. Already an artist and provocateur, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa was critical to this process—it was he who negotiated the form of the Honey Ant mural with local custodians and school authorities alike. Kaapa’s achievement was to give tangible form to the totemic landscape on which the colonial edifice was sited.

The Legacies of Bernard Smith: Essays on Australian Art, History and Cultural Politics collates a wide-range of essays on the life, work, and legacies of an Australian art historian whose prolific and varied career spanned seven decades. These essays, which are often tightly framed to cover an aspect or key topic in Smith’s career, and which are frequently a form of intellectual biography, give varied insight into Smith’s multiple works and engagements, as he helped to dramatically increase the cultural infrastructure and scholarship around Australian art, while ever wielding a complexly conceived ‘antipodean perspective.’ The review considers each of the four sections of the volume: on Smith’s seminal European Vision and the South Pacific (1960), his role in defining Australian Art, his various work in and interactions with public art museums, and his broader cultural politics.

This chapter looks at the new theories of contemporary art that appeared from the end of the 1960s into the early 1970s, as writers turned away from artistic (and, by now, defensive) nationalism towards a new art that uneasily managed to be both internationalist and autobiographical. That this turn occurred in the process of young artists’ disillusionment precisely with the art movement—conceptual art—which was the most truly globalised and the least tainted by nationalism or provincialism. This was remarkable. So, at the turn into the 1970s within the small art worlds of Melbourne and Sydney, Donald Brook, an immensely literate and indisputably brilliant—if pugnacious and irascible—art theorist, not only explained that national identity was irrelevant in art but also mounted devastating arguments in support of his theories. Brook was resolutely concerned with art but not at all concerned with ‘Australian art.’

This essay shows the provenance for one of Arthur Streeton’s greatest paintings, The Grand Canal (1908) which has not been featured in major Streeton publications of the late nineteenth century, or twentieth century, because it has been out of public circulation for up to 84 years. This paper is the longer version of the three published articles.

The Field, in 1968, was the first exhibition held at the new National Gallery of Victoria. The exhibition made a bold modernist statement: seventy-four abstract paintings and sculptures by forty young Australian contemporary artists. The Field was a controversial undertaking because it was clearly derived from contemporary New York avant-garde styles. This paper considers The Field's impact and legacy based on the numerous exhibitions it has subsequently inspired. It focuses on The Field's efforts to align Australian art with the international modernist tradition and argues that the exhibition established a new role and identity for the art institution in Australia. The modernist values introduced by The Field had a considerable impact on the Australian art world, far greater than the avant-garde style for which the exhibition is known.

After a book, exhibition and several earlier articles, this represents my latest and final attempt to sum up the historiographical back-story to 12 years of research about late 19th-century Australian art.

Discussions of Australia’s settler-colonial visual culture have long been focussed on the landscapes and bush scenes of Melbourne’s Australian impressionist painters. However, it was the wood-engraved pictures reproduced in colonial Australia’s lively illustrated press, especially in Sydney, that both dominated its visual culture between 1850 and 1900 and influenced these Victorian artists. By giving greater prominence to Sydney’s artist-illustrators what emerges into clear view is an Australia-wide art movement defined not only by its racialized, masculinist, and triumphalist settler iconography but by its continuing reliance on Britain’s imperial art-world for its art-workers and aesthetic direction as well. It nevertheless took an American-inspired enterprise—The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia—to help catalyse this movement’s coming of age in the mid-1880s. Between the exodus of Australia’s leading settler-colonial artists to London around 1900 and their return to these shores after the First World War, the locus of their movement oscillated between Sydney and the Chelsea Arts Club. A century later their vision of a White Australia remains attractive to many art lovers, a conundrum for those seeking to hasten Australia’s stubbornly slow transition to a truly post-colonial society.

The timeline that you will find in the following centrefold charts a history of Australia’s women-only collective and collaborative art projects, locating contemporary practices within a fertile landscape of women’s galleries, curatorial initiatives, publications, discussion networks and group art practices.
The dates and names listed here are drawn from my doctoral thesis on women’s art collectives and collaboration in Australia (1970–2010) that was completed at Sydney’s UNSW Art & Design in 2014, and from the deep awareness that this history is largely unwritten and inaccurately recorded. Additions and amendments are warmly welcomed (send to: Louise R Mayhew: l.mayhew@unsw.edu.au).
A parallel timeline of Australian feminist art history, with a greater focus on exhibitions and solo practices, exists on Wikipedia. More entries, and more contributors, are always welcome to the project (Australian feminist art timeline: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_feminist_art_timeline).

The University of Melbourne holds some of the finest and most historically important collections of Australian Aboriginal art and material culture in the world. At various times over the past hundred years, staff, students and associates of the university commissioned, were presented with, purchased or traded outstanding and unique examples of the rich and dynamic art and material cultures of Australia’s first peoples. The beauty and elegance of individual works and the wealth of knowledge, expertise and experience contained in these collections is yet to be fully realised or revealed. This paper makes a start at mapping these collections.

This paper explores the origins and development of the public dialogue between Bernard Smith (1916-2011) and Robert Hughes (1938-2012). Smith and Hughes were giants of Australian art history of the twentieth century. Both, however, followed very different career paths: Smith’s readership was primarily academic and local, while Hughes’s audience was popular and international. And yet, despite these differences, a considerable amount of exchange existed between the two. After first locking horns in 1961, Smith and Hughes engaged in public debate intermittently for more than four decades. This dialogue, which transpired in the pages of published sources, especially their reviews and books, was characterised by acrimony and bitterness, as well as moments of conciliation and mutual respect. When contesting issues of common interest, both writers played to their natural strengths. Smith was dominant in the field of art history, while Hughes had the upper hand in art criticism. Each, however, encroached upon the other’s area of expertise: Smith wrote art criticism and Hughes wrote art history. Conflict was greatest in areas where their respective spheres of authority overlapped. Although tensions receded after 1964, when Hughes left Australia, they did not end. Key topics of debate included abstract art and modernism; provincialism and internationalism; and most importantly the vexed issue of Australian cultural isolation, which was defined in terms of Australian art and its relationship to European art history (or, as Smith termed it, ‘Renaissance tradition’).

Adrian Feint was a significant Australian artist whose body of work included illustrations, graphic design, murals, and textile designs. Well-respected by patrons and peers, his art, prints and bookplates are collected publicly and privately, both in Australia and overseas. While today Feint's name brings to mind imagery of floral still lifes and surreal landscapes, the artist devoted his early career to creating bookplates - 221 over his career. What comes across in his plates is a profound intuition and ability to create a work unique and personal to its owner. The bookplates of Adrian Feint have been largely overlooked by Australian art history, but reveal a rich story of Australian art and society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Sydney's inaugural commemorative bronze was unveiled above Farm Cove in 1842. It was dedicated to Sir Richard Bourke, Governor of New South Wales from 1831 to 1837. As there were no foundries in the colony, the work was designed and cast in England by Edward Hodges Baily, Royal Academician. Although Baily's portrayal (from his London studio) of Bourke is worthy of comment, more significant is the statue's orientation in public space. Sited on an eminence, a huge plinth raised Bourke further above the ground, allowing him to survey the Governor's domain and residence, whose construction he had initiated, and Sydney Harbour, gateway to the colony. Providing scale to the monument was an adjacent stand of casuarina, regrown after the 1788 clearing to make the Colony's first public farm, providing the figure with the necessary scale. The memorial also implied usurpation, since Farm Cove, called Wuganmagulya by the Cadigal, had been a place of initiation and corroboree for the Eora nation. The Bourke monument was the first point on what would develop as an axis of civic sculpture that defined the eastern side of the city. The paper sets a public monument in the context of city building and the colonizing process.

This is a book about colour as a primary aspect of things. What can we learn if we give colour this respect? In the following essays, colours are materialized as cake icing, railway signals, gravestones, clothing, landscapes and atmospheres, paintings, film and photographs. The colours are 're-materialized' because as material stuff they are part of our everyday lives and not merely the mental concept 'colour' , an idea that belongs to post-Enlightenment European cultures. This is also a book about the socialness of colours. Attaching colour to culture refigures it as part of human society relevant to political economy and aesthetics (Gage 1993; Pinney 2006). Colour can swiftly travel from being merely a consumer choice to a fundamental idea about ordering and classifying the world. Investigating the concept of colour leads to some other key concepts: universality and relativity, cognition, classification, agency and the vitality of things, the colonialism of ideas, the dynamic interaction of people and environment, of subjects and objects. Colour in the singular often refers to the concept of colour, and colours in the plural to practices and substances (Batchelor 2008). over recent years materiality has become important theoretically in anthropology. Cultural theories about things promise that the relationships between people and things (subjects and objects) are central to understanding cosmology, power and multiple facets of a society (Miller 2005). Things have qualities that they bring to bear on humans. one of the purposes of this book is to ask what coloured materials do. It is not novel to write about colour as materialized. There are a multitude of books on colour already in the world. The majority are practical manuals aimed at the consumer, and they provide tips on colouring your home, choosing assemblages of colour in your clothing,

The award of the Archibald Prize in 1944 to William Dobell for his “modernist” portrait of Joshua Smith provoked what one newspaper described at the time as “the biggest legal smash hit since Ned Kelly”. The controversy convulsed Sydney’s art world, knocked the Pacific War off the front pages of newspapers, attracted international attention and saw a crush of viewers pack the normally serene halls of the Art Gallery of NSW. Leading the uproar and subsequent bitter legal battle was Mary Edwards, the painter who with Garfield Barwick as counsel, prosecuted the case against Dobell and the gallery trustees all the way to the Supreme Court of NSW. Written by Peter Edwell, a relative of Mary Edwards, this book is the first dedicated study of the controversy and landmark court case, which reverberates in Australian art and legal circles to this day.

See you at the barricades is a speculative exhibition that explores some of these ideas through a selection of works in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The exhibition ranges from historical protest works through to contemporary reflections of dissent. There are four sections, each with a thematic title: ‘Declarations’ (political posters and slogans); ‘Screenings’ (television, archives and documentary); ‘Left-wing melancholy’ and finally a single work titled Revolutionary love: I am your worst fear, I am your best fantasy by Sharon Hayes

The time has come to view Australian impressionist art as part of a larger settler-colonial art movement, intimately linked to an even greater story of British art in an age of Empire.  Viewed from this perspective, Streeton’s iconic paintings can be seen as settler-colonial monuments that dominate the walls of Australia’s major public galleries, just as the statues of Captain Cook, Queen Victoria, and Governor Macquarie command the great public spaces of Sydney and inscribe similar views of Australia’s history and national identity.

This book aims to redefine Australia’s earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category "Aboriginal art," tracing the term’s use through published literature in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of "Aboriginal art" developed in the European imagination, manifested in early literature, and became a distinct classification with its own criteria and form. Part of the larger story of Aboriginal/European engagement, this book provides a new vision for an Australian art history reconciled with its colonial origins and in recognition of what came before the contemporary phenomena of Aboriginal art.

An abridged and updated version of an article I wrote for the Melbourne Art Journal (11-12, 2009, pp.104-119). This draft paper contains new findings form the Papers of Joseph Burke, principally in form of letters from Cynthia Nolan to Professor Burke. These letters shed new light on Sir Kenneth Clark’s purchase of Little Dog Mine in 1949. These letters also reveal the crucial role that Cynthia had in promoting Sidney’s work in their early years together. Some of these letters have not, to my knowledge, been published before.

Art is different from traditional professions such as medicine or law. In the visual arts, there is little or no established career path, and professional accreditation is not required to create works of art. Perhaps for this reason, art is a field in which Australian women have excelled, at least in comparison to other male-dominated fields. Women artists were at the forefront of the modern movement in Australia, leading their male counterparts as the harbingers of the new movements and styles originating in Europe. Names such as Grace Cossington Smith (Thomas, 'Smith', ADB;

This book aims to redefine Australia’s earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category "Aboriginal art," tracing the term’s use through published literature in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of "Aboriginal art" developed in the European imagination, manifested in early literature, and became a distinct classification with its own criteria and form. Part of the larger story of Aboriginal/European engagement, this book provides a new vision for an Australian art history reconciled with its colonial origins and in recognition of what came before the contemporary phenomena of Aboriginal art.

In this materialist analysis of prints and drawings by contemporary Australian artist Tom Nicholson, Amelia Barikin situates the artist’s practice in a longer art history that includes the late twentieth-century charcoal drawings of Georges Seurat and Robert Morris’s Blind Time Drawings from the early 1970s. In so doing, Barikin shows how even Nicholson’s figurative prints and drawings generate a type of abstraction or “blindness”, in their pursuit of what she calls “haptic historiography”.

https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/lines-towards-another/

The ongoing revival of aboriginal art in Australia is emblematic of the nation's complex history, and the often fraught relationship between Australia's settlers and its native population. The beauty and cultural value of these works is without question, and their renaissance in Australian cultural life has carried them as far afield as Kyiv, where they have found resonance with their audience. Curator and cultural critic Myroslava Hartmond reflects on Australia's recent reappraisal of aboriginal culture, cultural diplomacy, and the relationship between Ukraine and the land Down Under.

Visual Representation of Australia's Peoples and Cultures in a Commonwealth Collection. An exhibition catalogue authored by the exhibition curator, Sarah Schmidt, with guest essay by Professor Marcia Langton. This 2002 exhibition included artwork from National and State galleries, libraries and museums as well as from university museums and private art collections.

*The stress throughout this article is on examining palpable facts and assessing firm evidence, not on theoretical speculation.
This historically-focused short article traces how a single art auction, the "Schureck sale" held in March 1962, effectively triggered a broad boom across the Australian market for modern art.  It discusses the proactive role taken by three Sydney gallery owners (Rudy Komon, Harold de Vahl Rubin, Terry Clune), who were visibly the chief bidders at the auction.  This includes tracing how the trio used the sale to lift prices for several painters they handled; with an abrupt jump in value of canvases by William Dobell being detailed (pre- and post-auction prices for several key pictures are listed and analysed). 
The article also scrutinises the sensationalist response of Australia's newsmedia to the sale, showing journalists' uncritical fixation on auction prices, their lack of financial savvy, and their blindness to what visibly occurred in the room on the night.  It then poses a set of lingering historical questions on the reliability (or lack of it) of Australian newsmedia reports on the domestic art market, generally, and high profile art auctions in particular.
3pp.
(this paper has now been incorporated into the book "Inside that Art Market", Thames & Hudson, 2016)

For nearly 180 years, between the early nineteenth and early twenty-first century, many art historians believed that Federico Barocci’s 1589 masterpiece variously titled Aeneas and his family fleeing Troy or simply The Burning of Troy, was last seen in London at an auction of paintings from the Orléans Collection in February 1800. We know what the painting looked like, and why it was created, and we know the details of the journey taken by the painting: from Italy to Prague; from Prague to Sweden; from Sweden back to Italy; then to France and to London. But for most who have written about the painting it disappeared from public sight after the auction of February 1800.
This is the story of how the painting in fact was not lost after the 1800 auction but was sold on several more occasions and went from London to Scotland and ultimately ended up in Australia where it was exhibited by Dr Farquhar McCrae. This is also the story of Farquhar McCrae, perhaps better known to Australian readers through his sister-in-law, Georgiana Huntly Gordon McCrae and the journal she wrote describing life in Melbourne during the 1840s. But Farquhar's life story is at least as interesting as that of Georgiana's, yet it has previously not been told, at least not in this detail.
But this story is not a mere list of dates and facts documenting a sequence of auctions and the sellers and buyers who traded in art works. They are the mere dots of history. The data points. And in joining those data points this story narrates the journey taken by Barocci’s lost painting. During the search, like Alice following the White Rabbit, we encounter clues that entice us to enter pathways that sometimes turn out to be dead ends. And, at the end of the journey, we may, or may not, have found the treasure we seek, but, either way, we can look back at the journey with a sense of great reward.

The 478 page, fully illustrated in colour, softcover edition, and an equivalent eBook/iPad version are available for purchase here: https://au.blurb.com/b/10604160-farquhar-mccrae-and-the-burning-of-troy

or through my Historia Incognita site here: https://historiaincognita.net/2020/02/16/the-search-for-federico-baroccis-lost-1589-painting-aeneas-flight-from-troy/

Essay commissioned by Mark Feary for Octopus 16: Antiques Roadshow, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 2016. Never published.
Featuring artists: Justin Balmain, Petra Cortright, Simon Denny, Heath Franco, Greatest Hits (Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn), Ying Miao, Michael Staniak, Amalia Ulman.

Emma Minnie Boyd  (1858 - 1936) was well placed to emerge as a highly professional and respected artist during the period of Marvellous Melbourne in the 1880s, even though her achievements, like so many female artists of her time, were not celebrated into the future. 

She was a painter in oils and watercolours, a printmaker, sculptor,  children's book illustrator, ceramics painter and she made numerous sketches.

Self-portraits play unexpected and revelatory roles in the context of Australia’s national collection of war art. Whereas ‘war art’ typically consists of visual documents created on behalf of other people’s experiences, or statements directed by political needs, these self-portraits reinterpret war through complex autobiographic narratives, introspective analysis, and privately held political stances.

This paper discusses several self-portraits from the twentieth century collection of the AWM. It shall identify key adaptations of the self-portrait genre within the context of their curatorial mission. It will demonstrate how self-portraiture has enabled official war artists to express perspectives not seen in the rest of their ‘war art’ legacy. Above all, self-portraits personalise their experiences of war for their increasingly detached audiences.

The work of the Imitation Realists has rightly been seen as marking the start of the widespread use of assemblage and popular culture by Australian artists during the 1960s. Viewed within the context of their training and the debates of the Australian art world in the 1950s, it can be seen that the impetus for their work was to find an alternative form of 'Australian' art. The stated objective of this thesis is to demonstrate how the work of the Imitation Realists adapted and contributed to changes to art in Australia. This is achieved by considering the work of Mike Brown, Ross Crothall and Colin Lanceley in the context of the debates that shaped the reception and production of art in Australia, including changing ideas concerning materials, exhibition display and the national identity. Their art, exhibitions and statements are closely analysed to show how the group formed, worked together and why they later disbanded. It is argued in this thesis that Imitation Realism arose as a response to what the artists saw as the inadequacy of local art practice. This was a result of a disconnection that they saw between contemporary art and daily life in Australia. The Imitation Realists found that both abstract and figurative painters were at a remove from modern urban life as they experienced it. They tried to form an authentic mode of art that connected with the materiality of the everyday. Assemblage enabled the artists to break through the impasse they perceived in contemporary art. Their work was one instance of a widespread interest in the 'primitive' and assemblage shared by artists in Europe and the United States. As virtually no precedent existed for their art in Australia, it is contextualised internationally in this thesis. This identifies that the Imitation Realists shared the practice of using deliberately naive techniques and styles to create work that sought to capture creativity at its most basic level. The Imitation Realists used assemblage to respond to modern life as a whole, not just to modernism with [...]

Introduction On his journey back to Australia in 1919, official war correspondent and historian Charles Bean wrote a detailed proposal for an Australian war memorial museum that included sketches of the façade and a floor plan for the projected building (Figure 1). The memorial was to be monumental, built in the neo-classical revival style, and include dedicated spaces for the display of art, photography, models (dioramas) and documents. A massive central hall would display large objects, but, more importantly, the walls would become the heart of the building, holding a roll of honour listing of all those who died in military service during the First World War. The sketch, and Bean’s proposal as a whole, reveal the true scope and original purpose of Australia’s official war art scheme: to create a grand gallery of history paintings depicting Australia’s military involvement in the First World War. There are over 70 large paintings on Bean’s list of planned commissions – and more tha...

Australian impressionism was part of a much wider settler-colonial art movement that embraced both Melbourne’s painters and Sydney’s artist-illustrators. Whatever the medium, their work reflected dominant views of Australia’s history, achievements and identity, their pictures defined by their celebration of whiteness, masculinity and settlers’ claims to indigeneity by virtue of their possession of Australia’s sunburnt country. What remained outside their frames were the dispossession of First Nations’ peoples and the lives and labour of settler women.

In addition to sharing a common iconography, Sydney’s and Melbourne’s artists fed off a similar set of artistic influences, largely emanating from London and reinforced by the English-born and -trained artists who dominated these colonial outposts of Britain’s imperial art world. These would include such French-inflected British art practices as plein air painting and tonal realism. In other words, we might start talking about British-Australian impressionism and its distinctive contribution to British art history.

From this perspective, Roberts, Streeton and Fullwood’s move to London can be seen as not the ending but the completion of Australia’s settler-colonial art movement; its homecoming to the heartland of British art. The art they created in England was integral to both their cultural and imperial identities and their artistic development.

The movement ultimately culminated in these artists’ wartime service. It was particularly fitting that Australia’s war art scheme drew on the skills of painters like Streeton but still more heavily on artist-illustrators like Fullwood, whose pictures proved perfect illustrations for Charles Bean’s creation of the Anzac legend — yet another enduring evocation of a settler-colonial worldview.

An essay based on A.H. Fullwood's 'Sketching Letter', written in 1886 of his travels through the New England district of New South Wales for the 'Picturesque Atlas of Australasia'. It's the only contemporary account of an Atlas artist's responses to the people and places he was encountering.

Richard Read, ‘Continental Shift III: The Impact of Science’, third of three blog posts on Three Early Paintings in ‘Continental Shift’, an Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Paintings at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, 30 July 2016-5 February 2017, Histories of Emotion From Medieval Europe to Contemporary Australia

https://historiesofemotion.com/2017/02/09/continental-shift-iii-the-impact-of-science/

Richard Read, ‘Continental Shift II: The Problem of History’, second of three blog posts on Three Early Paintings in ‘Continental Shift’, an Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Paintings at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, 30 July 2016-5 February 2017, Histories of Emotion From Medieval Europe to Contemporary Australia

https://historiesofemotion.com/2017/02/03/continental-shift-ii-the-problem-of-history/

In 1943, Mary Alice Evatt was appointed the first woman trustee of an Australia state art gallery. Prior to this point, women’s voices were rarely heard in Australian artistic institutions. Not only were they marginalised as artists, women were also denied agency as cultural producers. That said, by curating exhibitions as private initiatives, some women managed to cut against the grain, counteracting to an at least limited extent the patriarchal traditions of the art world. Among them, Clarice Zander and her contribution to the Australian art scene have recently been brought back into the limelight by art historians.
In 1941, Zander organised the exhibition An Englishman’s Home. While it presented a historical overview of English decorative arts since the 18th century, Zander’s exhibition claimed to portray the beginning of Australian History as part of the British Empire. To this extent, such female-curated exhibition allowed women to also participate in the construction of colonial narratives. Taking a closer look at Zander’s curatorial choices, this paper will discuss the tropes that she, as an outsider, had to mobilise to mount that exhibition and gain access to the cultural sphere — tropes that included such colonial histories.
This paper will also show that, although the exhibition may be seen as perpetuating a white supremacist perspective on colonial encounter, it also conveyed an ambivalent retelling of early imperial encounters. At a time when discrimination against Indigenous Australians was beginning to raise community disquiet, Zander’s simultaneous exclusion and inclusion of indigenous elements in her exhibition suggests the ambivalent place occupied by Indigenous people in both hers and the Australian imaginary. This paper aims to show what Zander’s retelling of Australia’s colonial history in her exhibition owes to her status as a female in the art world. It will demonstrate how this exhibition can be construed as an embodiment of the partial alleviation of the repression of female voices as well as an expression of contemporary anxieties about colonial encounters.

When the narratives of the NLA’s A Nation Imagined and my work on Fullwood are combined with those attached to the legend, paradigm and brand of Australian impressionism, the result will be a richer and much-enlarged story about this fabled era in Australia’s art history.

For a start, we can begin to see that Australian impressionism was part of a much wider settler-colonial art movement that embraced both Melbourne’s painters and Sydney’s artist-illustrators. Whatever the medium, their work reflected dominant views of Australia’s history, achievements and identity, their pictures defined by their celebration of whiteness, masculinity and settlers’ claims to indigeneity by virtue of their possession of Australia’s sunburnt country. What remained outside their frames were the dispossession of First Nations’ peoples and the lives and labour of settler women.

In addition to sharing a common iconography, Sydney’s and Melbourne’s artists fed off a similar set of artistic influences, largely emanating from London and reinforced by the English-born and -trained artists who dominated these colonial outposts of Britain’s imperial art world. These would include such French-inflected British art practices as plein air painting and tonal realism. In other words, we might start talking about British-Australian impressionism and its distinctive contribution to British art history.

From this perspective, Roberts, Streeton and Fullwood’s move to London can be seen as not the ending but the completion of Australia’s settler-colonial art movement; its homecoming to the heartland of British art. The art they created in England was integral to both their cultural and imperial identities and their artistic development.

The painting of both the Resolution and Discovery in Adventure Bay by William Ellis is important because it is one of the few surviving original works in which Cook's ships are painted in Australian waters, and which include Australian landscape.